“It covers all aspects of player support except technical coaching and national teams’ administration and operates in partnership with clubs. This season, 185 players represented England at senior side, 7s, A-Team, U21 and U19 levels. More than 400 players will be involved as the Regional Academies develop and we provide support services for all of them. Every England player should receive consistent messages in the sports sciences: fitness and conditioning; mental preparation and other psychology-related activities; diet and nutrition; video analysis and notation. Medical care through the provision of sports medicine doctors, physios and masseurs and when players need operations, must be consistently of the highest standard. Younger players particularly need help through career and education counselling in making appropriate higher education choices during and after their rugby careers. We also need to research and develop new ideas and techniques to stay sharp.”

What is your role in all this?

“I have to plan, implement, review and seek to improve our support services, making as many as possible of the excellent things we do inevitable, looking for new angles at the top levels and disseminating the excellent practice (“good” isn’t good enough!) to all England teams. I ensure we have a succession plan for technical staff and don’t have to start from scratch every time someone leaves. And all this has to be embraced by players and coaches - having a positive impact on their ability to compete.”

Where do our Elite Support Services stand in world terms?

“The senior side is the gold standard, while we share absolutely Clive Woodward’s philosophy of always striving to improve. The gap between the senior side and the other England teams is, however, too great at present - we need to lift the support programmes of the other teams so that at an early age, potential England players know what will be expected of them and what they should expect of us in return.”

What have you done since December?

“Most of my time has been spent working on medical care. A player’s ability to train and play depends on his health and we’ve got a long way to go before we can claim to be comparable with the best in this area. We’ve made some good progress and now have a full complement of contracted England medical staff and a doctor and a physio on development bursaries. We’ve held a rugby medicine conference with the Zurich clubs and we’re starting to develop greater trust and are working in partnership to benefit everyone.
“That work embraces such things as an injury audit, feasibility work on a managed medical care scheme for professional players and implementing a web-based system to help manage injuries.

“We’ve appointed Calvin Morriss to develop the fitness and conditioning programmes for the England 7s team and the National Academy, and Ross Appleton as an analyst to work with England teams.”

What are the big challenges for the future?

“Fine tuning and building on the senior side support services programme, whilst ensuring that they become the standard to which we aspire for the other teams.

“I’d like to create a dental care programme and we urgently need a research and development programme - possibly a small number of studies via PhD or MSc/MBA level students, but according to the RFU’s priorities, which we haven’t established so there’s a job to do there.

“Some work is going on with the senior side on decision making and mental preparation, but there’s not much with our development teams. We need to assist players with decision making, goal setting when recovering from serious injury for example.

“We need to broaden the work we did with the senior players this season with the Centre for Nutritional Medicine Basic, to find an alternative way of maintaining and broadening the programme to provide nutrition guidelines for players starting at Regional Academy level

“We also need to set medical and fitness standards for the Regional Academies and make players fight for the right to be part of them and to do that we need a partnership with the English Institute of Sport to provide local support for the younger players.

“A number of the projects we’re working on in medical care will be reporting during next season and the big challenge of implementing the changes will start then. This is a never ending process because if we’re still doing tomorrow what we’re doing today we’ll be overtaken.”

The very term “Elite” suggests that your work doesn’t affect the grass roots of the game. Is that true?

“Not entirely, although our work is concentrated directly on the 400 or so players for whom the Performance Department is responsible. The more we can demonstrate high performance through the England teams, the more we can create role models for younger players in the Community game to emulate. A simple example is the interest now coming from the Community game in improved diet, so we will start to provide some basic guidelines for younger players and their parents to follow.

“We’re also ran a Rugby Medicine conference in Manchester for the Community game as part of the M2002 Commonwealth Games and I’m very keen to increase our presence on the RFU web-site, providing some insight to what it’s like to be an international player. That way players in the Community game can learn from the top levels if they’re keen to develop.”

You said you felt you had the best job in British sport in 1996. What about this one?

“I reckon I’ve still got the best job in British Sport, but the great thing about this environment is that there are plenty of people who disagree with me, because they think they have. Everyone involved in the England Performance set up wants to be associated with excellence in everything they do and that’s a demanding standard to achieve.”